Quote:
Originally Posted by ecomodded
That is a serious solar panel. It must put out 5 or10 amps on a sunny day. If your car uses 10 amps to run , lets say your panel is putting out 6 amps, your battery would only have to carry 4 amps. 4 amps an hour is not going to drain the battery. I have complete faith in your Solar charging system. Adding some high output led spot lights flush to the grill block would be a nice feature. One that i plan on doing to my Beetle. Its headlights are weak and suck amps.
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I agree withthe math above - My HX with alt delete does seem to need about 10A to run the car, as long as I'm not running headlights or fans. Headlights take another 10-12 amps.
I like this project. Nice job. I'm concerned about the aero losses from the roof panel but you may be improving that situation.
4A draw (after adding in the 6A from the solar charger) won't have much effect on your large deep cycle battery's state of charge, if you only do that for an hour or two. However if you've read into these batteries' behavior, you already know they last longest if kept well charged up. So top it off if you draw down more than 5-10 amps, is my advice. If you can top it off daily that's nice but I wouldn't go, say, a week, drawing it down 50A or more, and then recharge on weekends. If you want it to have a long life, recharge more often than that.
Kudos for building it with a large deep cycle. Mine is also pretty large, a Group 29 from WalMart; I estimate it at about 100AH by standard measurement. Enough to do the job without getting drained down much.